Some light years ago, I was living with my best friend in a small apartment in Southern California, on my own for the first time. It was our first New Year’s Eve together as that eager, barely tolerable species: raffish apartment-dweller-type dudes, barely out of high school. We were going to celebrate that self-congratulatory state of being with a New Year’s party.
That evening we had a respectable turnout of our friends, acquaintances, and other welfare cheats of note, and had settled in to the numerous foolishnesses of New Year’s Eve. We had a wee dram, and a wee dram more. As it neared midnight, my housemate and I had an insight: to christen the New Year, we could both doff our clothes and walk around outside in the soft warm rain that was falling. Did I mention we’d had a drink or two?
Equally inspired, my girlfriend decided to join us. We goofed around a bit out front, and then we saw two figures approaching up the block. In the great spirit of improvisation, my housemate and I worked up a plan: we would walk up to the people, acting as though we were in our fully clothed at-ease, and wish them Happy New Year’s. The creative act, in action.
Remember, it was dark and misting outside. Thus you can understand that it wasn’t until we were but five feet away from our prey and about to spring our greeting when we realized it was OUR LANDLORD AND LANDLADY, who lived only a few blocks away, and who had decided to walk over and wish us happy New Year’s. The fact that they were straight-laced, reserved people, and Eastern Europeans yet, made our calculation all the less calculating.
Well. We had perfect presence of mind and body: Run! Without saying a word, we turned and bolted for the house. Somebody at the party caught a classic snapshot of my housemate in manic mother-naked retreat into the house, eyes bulging out of his head like boiled eggs. Perhaps we thought we’d be safe inside. I literally ran into my closet and hid, lacking the benefit of clothing. I did say that I was young, right?
Naked and Afraid
So, the party was in full bloom while we’re all running in, screaming that the landlord was outside. We actually locked the door on him. The truly funny thing was that his wife’s full focus of outrage targeted only my girlfriend. We could hear my landlady shouting, “Naked women in streets! Naked women in streets!” over and over. What really caught our attention was our landlord, though, who shouted even louder, “All right, damn it, that’s it. I calling the cops. Cops to be here in five minutes. Everybody in big trouble!” After his shouting of a few more epithets, some not in English, they left.
All hell broke out inside. The aftermath was equally as mad as the inciting incident, but I’ll skip that because that’s not why I tell the tale here. I tell it because I’ve thought about that escapade many times over the last forty years, thinking it should be a scene in a novel. But I never had the novel to put it in, which even a neophyte reader at WU would tell you is the completely wrong way to think of the underpinnings and movement of a novel. Instead of considering that charged moment perhaps as emotionally telling backstory that might later alter a character’s path, or the incident as a ratcheting up of a plot point that bares character desire (or subverts it), I was thinking instead of a flashy scene, a little circus trick of white doves under a top hat, a gushing artery without the body or blood present.
It took me a long time to realize that it wasn’t the damp bodies and the roaring outrage that was the heart of the story—because that wasn’t a story, just some fireworks. Rather than search for the soul of the tale, I was using a grubby National Enquirer headline hunt. I hadn’t given any focus to the flagstones of real story potential. However, repeatedly turning the yellowing pages of the event’s photo album in my mind did prove to be helpful, because the album also contained the secondary cast, the images of my landlord and landlady, who came into deeper relief as my past pulled further away.
The Dolls
I remembered two middle-aged people, both Eastern European, both small, both dark of feature and dark of clothing, both constrained, both seemingly humorless. Neither that exceptional. Except. Except when, long before New Year’s, the landlady asked my friend and me, when we’d come over to deliver the rent check, to come down into the basement of her old house and see her “collection.” Who knew what prompted her? Neither my friend nor me could issue much more than a “wow!” or “yes, that’s something!” when she showed us her collection, down in the large basement of the 1920s apartment building.
Dolls. Hundreds of them, arranged in little scenes. Dolls sitting at tables having tea, at tables having dinner, on overstuffed chairs, on little swing sets. Little plastic Barbies or Raggedy Anns? Nary a one. No, these were those old-fashioned, porcelain-faced “bisque” dolls, many three and four feet tall, with realistic looking eyes and some with human-hair wigs, carefully combed.
The basement and the dolls were lavishly, splendidly creepy, especially to a 19-year-old boy. Some hugged each other, some seemed to be lecturing their fellows, some, lying on a full-sized bed, seemed to be dead. You knew those dolls talked about you when you left the room. And we left the room hurriedly, giving a quick thanks to our landlady, and never venturing down there again.
It took me forty years to realize that it wasn’t our New Year’s birthday-suit boogaloo that was any story; it was the dolls. So, I finally wrote a story, not a novel, that had the dolls as the central motif, with a dark turn at story’s end. I shopped it around to some literary journals, let it lie, shopped it around a bit more, and recently had it accepted at the beautiful literary and arts journal, Catamaran, where it will be published in the coming Winter issue. I don’t have much success with my fiction, so that’s a gift for me.
The Deeper Tissue of Yearning
So, forty years to find the story, two years to get it published. Just a couple of small lessons here, yet good ones: you can find moments in your life, you can plumb your history, and find fragments and episodes that might usefully color your fiction. But often it’s not those bright poppies of incident, not the driving over 100 mph without a seat belt—those things faithfully recorded and accurately recounted provide little more than wallpaper for a story. It’s more what our own David Corbett discussed at the writer’s conference I recently attended in LA. I can’t do justice to David’s concepts in just a few sentences, but in summary, he said you must find a character’s yearning.
David spoke eloquently of looking for and expressing what a character dreamed of being, and perhaps what has kept them from the dream. Are they escaping something, are they wounded, are they heading away, by temperament or circumstance, from their best selves? [David, please take over here while I look for some other author’s ideas to steal.]
My landlady, always so restrained for us, came alive when she was gesturing to her dolls. “This one! And look, those!” They had no kids that lived with them; maybe they were childless, or maybe any children were far away. But she did have the dolls. Thus, in me using my old landlord and landlady in the story, it wasn’t quite writing what I know, but writing what I know disturbed me, whether in a good way or a bad. What was in that basement was suggestive of larger landscapes.
Don’t dismiss those youthful things that haunt you, but look in them for the deeper yearning. And if they fit, put them in your fiction. (But damn, if you’ve got a basement full of those dolls, lose my phone number.)
You of WU, do you have crazed or charged incidents in your past that you’ve hankered to use in your fiction? If so, were you able to use them so it made for a compelling story, rather than something wrenched on because it was shiny? And, have you ever shown your landlady your best midnight look?
Note: For a while I’ve had some psychogenic lightning storms, some specifically regarding my fiction efforts, that have left me a bit wobbly. So I’m stepping out of the WU schedule for a bit (maybe just for cookies and milk), but I’ll be certainly be around in the comments boxes when a curmudgeon is called for. Happy Thanksgiving!
About Tom Bentley
Tom Bentley is still trying to figure out what flavor of writer he is, but so far he’s a short story writer, novelist, essayist, travel writer, journalist, and business copywriter. He edits all that stuff too. His new book, Think Like a Writer: How to Write the Stories You See is available as an ebook on Amazon. His singing has been known to frighten the horses.
Tom, what a great story. And it underscores the need for writers to look not only at their own experiences, but to pay attention to those memorable nuggets involving others in their orbits, whether it’s a landlady or a friend with weird hobbies. There is gold to be mined in our past experiences. Happy Thanksgiving and try to keep your clothes on this New Year’s Eve.
CG, thanks. I like your mention of “orbits” here: sometimes it’s the smaller planets that end up having the most gravity (or which authors, playing the Creator, can assign the most gravity later). And, staying celestial, we can give some exposure to the dark side of the moon that only exists in our imagination, like my ending to the fictional dolls story.
As for this coming New Year’s Eve, I’ll just stay in the closet for the entirety of the party. And keep my pants.
Beautifully written post, Tom. Great topic too.
The streaking episode is hilarious and visual. It would work well in a movie, a rom-com say. Good as it is, and as well told, it’s emotional grip is low.
On the other hand, the Eastern European landlady with her doll collection immediately raises intriguing questions. What the hell happened to this woman? What is she really trying to convey to her visitors? What do the dolls symbolize? Each staged doll scene means something, but what?
The streaking kids make me grin and wince (in recognition?), but the landlady with her doll collection makes my heart ache. So that, perhaps, is the measure of a memory’s narrative potential.
One memory is a funny anecdote, the other is emotional and suggestive, a microcosm of a story. It leads us places. Like your post. Congrats on the story sale, would love to read it when it’s out.
Don, yes, “emotional grip”—that’s an insightful phrase, and one that compresses a driving sense of story. I didn’t get answers for all the story-structuring questions you asked when I wrote it as fiction, but I did open up the story’s floor to those kind of questions.
I hadn’t considered that each staged doll scene had an individual meaning for her (probably because the whole of it was a horror show for me), but of course they did. Because of the care by which she laid them out, and the obvious sense that she came down to see the dolls regularly, if not every day. (And perhaps re-arrange them, if their spirits called for that?)
I’ll send you a link to the story when it comes out. Or I’ll just send you a creepy doll.
That’s a tough choice. Can I get both?
How can I deny the Mahatma of WU? I’ll see what I can do, and just hope it passes security at your office.
Wow! is all I can say because (1) this presentation of an old haunting incident and what could be made of it is compelling and (2) it reminds me of a house I once visited where hundreds of collector dolls lined the walls and even the stairway down to the cellar, a dozen large cages with well-tended foster cats filled the cellar, and the woman’s little daughter, after trying a couple of times to get her mother’s attention, crawled into an empty cat cage and curled up there while the woman fed and petted the cats. The dolls…the cats…the little daughter…they still wait for me.
Thanks for the nudge, Tom.
Woah. Eerily disturbing.
Veronic, wait—are you talking about my hair?
Oh, you mean the dolls, cats and child. Mmm, mmm, that is a tasty mix. For Stephen King and his ilk.
Definitely!
Stephen King, that is. Not the hair. :D
Anna, if there isn’t a story (or characters) there, I’m a dead-eyed doll. Those characters are waiting for you, but bring a flashlight (and maybe a hard hat) when you go.
Oh, thank you, Tom. I know there’s a good story there–probably several, with 5 POVs at last count.
Great stories and a great reminder. Thanks for a powerful post, Tom.
Keith, thanks. (But what is the reminder? That you have a basement full of dolls too? Dear me!)
“We used to think that comedy was watching someone do something silly…we came to realize that comedy was watching somebody watch somebody do something silly.” – John Cleese on the early days of Monty Python
Both of these stories, the comedic and the creepy, are great–and the heart of both of them is the landlord and lady. The first story wouldn’t be funny without them. Drunk fools taking their clothes off isn’t funny. The story is funny only because we see two “straight men” reacting to drunk fools taking their clothes off.
In the second story, the roles of straight man and fool are reversed. A woman tending to her doll collection isn’t interesting. A woman showing off her doll collection to a couple of young guys who are totally creeped out and flee in polite terror–that’s interesting.
Why do the interactions between contrasting characters make these stories interesting? Conflict, of course! Nothing is funny without conflict. Nothing is disturbing or pathetic without conflict, either.
T.K., yep, the “action/reaction” formula does inform that one rarely works without the other. Or that a seemingly innocuous thing or action might frame something of deep import for the viewer, because of backstory or history. And, by consequence, deep import for the reader.
I am reading Marilynne Robinson’s “Home” right now, and I’m bewitched by how she can frame some spare, seemingly mild exchange between a brother and sister, and the smallest gesture—him touching a scar on his face, or shifting uncomfortably in his chair—has killing weight. Because of his history with the family, which is also understatedly written.
I don’t know how to write like that, but I admire it to no end.
I love how the two events were juxtaposed, one a wild expression of carefree youthfulness, the other a creepy testimony of a difficult past. That the two stories are linked triggers a lovely storm in my brain, but to play them against each other like that is a lesson in itself. Thank you!
Veronic, you’re welcome. That was a lesson for me as well. In fact, I’ll thank you, because right after reading your note, I realized that there are a few (ahem) incidents in my past that could be tuned with more emotional resonance—and less ego—to make some story music.
Not at all the tedious “write what you know” but more of what Don was getting at above, finding and fixing the emotional grip of the incident. And making more of it than a recounting of an incident, but something that’s in the sinews of the story.
I was waaaaayyyyyyy too much of a goody-two-shoes (and still am, I’m afraid!), I have to make all the crazy stuff up from scratch!
Love the music analogy too.
Music IS emotion. I put together an actual soundtrack for my story.
And you say he’s the Mahatma of WU, well I believe Maass is short for magic.
Oh how I wish I’d hung out with you in those years (wait, did we? Or maybe more appropriately, would either of us remember if we had?). This wonderful post only makes me sadder about your temporary leave, Tom. I’ll be yearning for more in your absence. In the interim, can you please drop me an email of our forgotten shared adventures every so often? In any case, thanks for the laughs and the insight you’ve provoked this year, in your wonderful essays and comments.
Happy Thanksgiving! Here’s to your lightning storms providing flashes of brilliance that illuminate the page for the rest of us.
Vaughn, you’ve got it: it was YOU that stole those carburetors out of parked cars; I was just there to hold the tools.
I will email you of new developments on the storm front. I just need to “get my mind right,” as Strother Martin suggests to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke.
Happy Thanksgiving back at you!
Awesome post Tom! Totally hit the nail on emotion.
Not to add to the creepiness, but I used to live next door to two women, older, life-long partners. Great people, but for the time when they invited me in to have tea with their ‘kids’. Like you, I was freaked to meet their array of porcelain children, posed and ready for tea. I still remember coming home and telling my mom about it, and my mom suggesting, every Halloween, we head in the opposite direction. I think she was worried the ‘kids’ would be handing out candy. LOL.
Dee Willson
Author of A Keeper’s Truth
Denise, great gravy boats, what is it about people and their dolls? Especially those ones that look like real children. There’s that whole “uncanny valley” theory, about how humans have some threshold of revulsion that’s breached when some simulacrum of humanity reaches the point where it is unutterably “real.”
And now, with advances in robotics, it is real. Of course, some of us will be innocent about it: when I get my new robotic little brother, his whole life will revolve around making me excellent pancakes.
Congrats, Tom!
I look forward to reading your story.
I remember reading an interview with Tom Cruise, after that heroic pilot landed his plane in the water in NY and saved all his passengers lives. Mr. Cruise told the interviewer that he had lost count on how many people had asked him if he was going to make a movie about that real life event. He went on to say that what people who didn’t make movies didn’t understand was that the incident although gripping and powerful did not a movie make. It was a SCENE in a movie. And to put that scene in proper concept for a movie he would have to develop a story around it, in order to make a successful movie.
Perhaps, your scene of the naked Halloween antics will lead you on a path somewhere down the road to the story behind it. I’ve come to believe for every scene there is a story, just like for every action there is a reaction. It’s just we have to figure out which ones we need to tell, like you did with the dolls.
Whatever scene you’re going through write now, know that we will miss your posts here.
Blessed be your journey.
Bernadette, your reply make me once again kneel to the awesome—using the old definition of the word—power of imagination. There are nooks everywhere in our minds, filled up with little treasures. (Or disturbing dolls.)
Kind of like when Mockingbird’s Boo Radley left those toys in the old tree crack for Scout and Jem, and it was only much later that the story’s meaning fully emerged.
We do need to figure out which ones to tell, and give them their due. And thank you—I will always take a blessing, wherever I can get it.
What a great story Tom. Congratulations on the acceptance. Believe me, fiction is a lot harder for me too, so I get what an accomplishment this is. And yes, a basement full of dolls makes me wonder about the couple’s loss, whether they are survivors of the holocaust …
I figure if we live to be adults, there’s plenty of material. I wrote a short story based upon the time I taught my mother to drive that won first prize, but it still hasn’t been published in a magazine for teens :( I wrote about it here if you’re interested: http://vijayabodach.blogspot.com/2016/11/stretching-and-winning.html (maybe someone might want to publish it? I’m perennially optimistic)
Vijaya, I know so well what you mean about getting stories out into the public eye. (Who’s got time for them, when we have Instagram?) But it pays to remember: keep sending them out, and tweak them if need be. I have had stories published 20 years, literally, after I wrote them, not the mere two of the doll story in the post.
And you might not be interested in seeing that one as a nonfiction piece, but it sure sounds like a good candidate for a Chicken Soup for the Soul story, and they do pay some dough.
This is a gorgeous post, Tom, and I’ll return to it again and again. And, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I want to share my undying gratitude for this line in particular: “You knew those dolls talked about you when you left the room.”
XD
Erin, thank you. And I didn’t even have to think about that line when I wrote the post—it quickly crawled out from the dark basement of my fears.
There is in the northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan a site called The Cross in the Woods which boasts the largest crucifix in the world, as well as several Catholic shrines, a church, and a gift shop. Also on the grounds is a doll museum where more than 500 dolls are dressed in the habits of more than 200 religious orders. I have been there and I have to say it is one of the creepiest places I have ever been. Here’s a taste: http://www.crossinthewoods.com/doll-museum/)
Erin, of that museum, as the Monty Pythoners would say, “Run away! Run away!”
Of course, as a former altar boy and Catholic schoolboy of 10 years, I did get vengeance on the nuns whopping me over time with wooden pointers by putting a very large mustache on the nun puppet I own. My own doll museum is not broad, but it’s unusual.
Loved this. Am I the only one that wants to know the result of the streaking incident? Did the police come? Did you and your buddies get booted from the apartment?
Charlotte, you asked: no, we didn’t wait around to see if the cops came. We all rushed to our cars—the one I was using that night being my girlfriend’s mom’s cherry Karmann Ghia and drove away. Well, most of us drove away.
The Ghia didn’t have the best tires, and it was one of the first rains in a while, making for slick streets, so in zooming away, I hydroplaned the Ghia into the very solid rear of a friend’s Dodge Dart when he stopped at the first stop sign around our corner.
If you know Ghias, they don’t want to run into anything, because they are fragile beasts. The whole front end was destroyed, but I could still drive it back to my girlfriend’s house, with one fender scraping horribly against the tire. The best part: we pulled up to a stoplight mid-way, and there was a guy with a gorilla mask on driving the car next to us, and he just stared fixedly at us, much like the famous Twilight Zone with William Shatner, who sees a yeti on the wing of his plane and it drives him mad.
Or maybe it was a real gorilla. That was as scary as the dolls.
Oh, the car was totaled, according to the insurance company. My old girlfriend’s mom, who loved that car, never forgot that. The landlord came over the next day and said we had to be out in three days, which we did, not knowing he couldn’t do that legally. We ended up sleeping in a public park for about a week before we found a new place.
Sorry I’ve gone on so long here, but it was quite a night.
Wow! I think you must’ve mentioned that Karmann Ghia because I remember. And thanks for the tip on Chicken Soup. I will try.
Quite a night, indeed! Sounds like the makings of several stories embedded in that one night. Thanks for telling the rest of it.
Vijaya, I told the New Year’s Eve story in another context for an article a ways back, one that didn’t mention the dolls or any fictional aspects, so perhaps you saw it there. I wish the crushed Karmann Ghia was a fiction, but it wasn’t.
Good luck with that soup!
Had to Google Karmann Ghia. Looks like a Ford Thunderbird and a Jaguar had a baby. What a shame you had to go and kill it.
Not the only car that I’ve sent to the grave. But sadly, this one wasn’t mine. Love your car-childbirth description though.
Ann Blair Kloman
It was the little child, so eager for her mother’s love and attention that she crawled into the cat’s cage, waiting…that made me sad. Ann
Ann, that IS sad. But for the writer, there are lots of stories within Anna’s story of the dolls, cats and the daughter in the cage. What if it was that the daughter thought she was a cat? Or if the mom used to put her in the cage to protect her from something? Or if the cats worshipped the daughter like a god? (Knowing cats though, they only worship a warm cushion.)
So interesting that fiction could take many paths…
Hey Tom:
First, thanks for the wonderful post. Second for the attaboy.
I think you do a great job of summarizing what I mean by yearning. I usually encapsulate it as: The kind of person the character wants to be, the way of life she hopes to live. (I added some nuance to that in my recent post about the soul.)
Raising the question: So why isn’t she that person? Why isn’t she leading that life? What’s holding her back?
The answer lies in a weakness (laziness, self-doubt, timidity); a wound (some great loss or setback); limitation (poor health, inexperience, sex, race); or flaw (greed, envy, selfishness, cruelty).
In a way, the character is torn between two competing desires: to fulfill the promise of life vs. to minimize the pain of life. Both are legitimate. But they often if not always work at cross purposes.
But I’ve been reading a book on neurobiology titled Descartes’ Error, and it put the matter somewhat differently. We are creatures trying to survive, and we develop strategies based on our experiences that help maximize our chances of survival. Some of those strategies involve reaching for the stars. Some involve hiding under a rock.
But it’s in searching into the character’s past for those moments that educated her in the merit of star-reaching or rock-hiding that we learn most about her. In particular, it’s in that exploration that we learn about dolls kept in basements, and ill-considered nudity on New Year’s. In such moments, the character’s true nature emerges.
Have a wonderful holiday. I humbly suggest remaining clothed.
David, yes, yes, thank you for elaborating on the yearning theme, and giving me yet more to think about on it. That tango between competing desires is the source of so many stories (and some of my own).
And a book titled Descartes’ Error does frighten me, but indeed we are creatures trying to survive. I’ll probably do better at that with my clothes on. Thanks again for working out some of those driving (and sometimes off the road) hopes of story characters.
Ah, Antonio Dimasio (the neurobiologist.) Look up his TED talk, Tom. Fella understands how our minds actually work.
Well, most of them.
Our Little One has discovered that Snapchat works on her dolls, but, occasionally, not on her mother’s face. It reminds me of a snippet of an old movie I wish I could forget.
So Joel, you like Dimasio too? Have to check him out, to keep Descartes before the horse. (I know, tired joke, but man I was desperate to get it in.)
I’m not sure which old movie is haunting you (Valley of the Dolls doesn’t work, but Whatever Happened to Baby Jane might), but I hope it stays in your nightmares and doesn’t make it out to Snapchat.
Very cool story within a story. I believe I’ll remember those dolls! Thanks also for sharing David’s wisdom at the conference. Copied out “David spoke eloquently of looking for and expressing what a character dreamed of being, and perhaps what has kept them from the dream. Are they escaping something, are they wounded, are they heading away, by temperament or circumstance, from their best selves.”
Carol, it’s only been 40+ years I’ve been trying to forget those dolls. I haven’t. And yes, David’s stuff, elaborated upon in the comments here, is a full table for the writer.
For my 50th birthday, my boyfriend took me to an expensive restaurant. Our waiter looked like a bodyguard for the Mafia, maybe on the side. His solid fat bulged from his vest, and when he brought the bread basket, it looked like a toy in his hand.
The basket contained three pieces of bread. Not four? Which one of us would get the third piece? Would we share? Fight over it? I grabbed it, and my boyfriend asked for another basket.
The waiter brought three more pieces, which we quickly polished off. We asked for another basket. The waiter slammed it down, pivoted, and walked away, when my boyfriend said, “Can we have more than three pieces?”
The waiter froze. The jazz trio in the corner froze. The family dining at the next table looked up. The waiter stood for several long moments, then rolled back his massive shoulders and kept going.
I tried shoving that scene into one of my novels. It didn’t help the story one iota.
Great column! What is it about dolls that are so creepy? Definitely want to read your story.
Well, damn, what was it about the three pieces? Is that some kind of numerology taboo for the owner or something? Or maybe the owner was a amateur psychologist, observing how the patrons would negotiate the division or contend over it, or pretend not to care? Great story!
As for why dolls are creepy, you’ll have to ask the dolls. It’s a conspiracy.
Great stories! One reminded me of my similar experience back when I was still a student. We used to play around with my housemates and roommates and tripped over with our landlord. The experience is unforgettable and it sometimes makes me feel I wanna write something funny about past memories. Thanks for a great post.
Francesca, you should give in to the impulse to write those stories—you might be surprised at what you come up with, which is one of the great pleasures of writing. (By the way, when you say “tripped over with your landlord,” I’m not certain if you mean that how I might mean it. Which is, if I’d dropped acid with my landlady, I might still be down in that basement.)